Young woman: You are not very aggressive, but I think you don’t want me to notice that.

Doctor: What makes you think I am not very aggressive?

Young woman: You don’t argue with me.

Doctor: Why do you think I don’t argue with you?

Young woman: You are afraid of me.

Doctor: Does it please you to believe I am afraid of you?

Young woman: My father is afraid of everybody.

Doctor: What else comes to mind when you think of your father?

Young woman: Bullies.

Does that have anything to do with the fact that your boyfriend made you come here?

Do you see how the woman is being drawn deeper into the conversation, offering up more personal information about herself and becoming more invested in what the doctor is saying? Notice, too, how little the doctor actually says. His replies are open-ended questions and restatements of her thoughts and feelings, often in the form of a question.

The young woman in this conversation, in other words, is being gradually seduced by the doctor’s cold reading skill.

How does this doctor so effortlessly peer into another person’s soul and build an intimate connection? Who is this doctor with such profound seduction skills?

The “doctor” is a computer program.

Dr. Joseph Weizenbaum, of M.I.T., developed a computer program that would enable a human to apparently carry on a conversation with a computer. One version of his program is called “Doctor” The program is designed to “talk” like a Rogerian psychotherapist. Such a therapist is relatively easy to imitate because the basis of Rogers’ technique is simply to feed the patient’s statements back to him in a paraphrased form. The human, playing the role of the patient, types in questions and answers on a teletype machine. The computer, under control of the program, types replies and questions on the same teletype paper. […]

Doctor is a quite primitive program as natural-language programs go. It employs a lot of tricks and stock phrases. It has no mechanisms for actually understanding sentences. Instead it seeks out keywords that are typed and does some simple syntactical transformations. For example, if the program sees a sentence of the form “Do you X!” it automatically prints out the response “What makes you think I X'” When Doctor cannot match the syntax of a given sentence it can cover up in two ways. It can say something noncommittal, such as “Please go on” or “What does that suggest to you?” Or it can recall an earlier match and refer back to it, as for example, “How does this relate to your depression?” where depression was an earlier topic of conversation.

In essence Doctor is a primitive cold reader. It uses stock phrases to cover up when it cannot deal with a given question or input. And it uses the patient’s own input to feed back information and create the illusion that it understands and even sympathizes with the patient. This illusion is so powerful that patients, even when told they are dealing with a relatively simple-minded program, become emotionally involved in the interaction. Many refuse to believe that they are dealing with a program and insist that a sympathetic human must be at the control at the other end of the teletype.

The above was quoted from an excellent paper on the seductive potency of cold reading, a subject about which the Chateau has written extensively as being a useful tool for bedding women, and which has been a staple manipulation technique described in PUA literature. (I really have to wonder how the anti-game haters can read stuff like this and continue to nurse their denialist delusions. Scratch that, I don’t wonder. The answer is simple: they have little experience seducing women or, for that matter, selling anything, including themselves, to anyone.)

The section in the paper subtitled “The Rules of the Game” is particularly good, and offers some ground rules for improving your cold reading skill.

Cold reading, like its sister skill non-evaluative listening (also demonstrated above), is a powerful rapport-building conversational combo. It is especially effective when used on women, who, being the naturally intuitive sex, tend to formulate phantom connections from nebulous, fact-free associations, like the kind that is the stock in trade of “reading” gimmicks such as palmistry and astrology.

You do not need these gimmicks to successfully cold read a woman, but in hothouse courtship environments like bars and parties they serve as expedient springboards. If girly gimmicks aren’t your thing, you can substitute with a cold reading “stock spiel”:

You can achieve a surprisingly high degree of success as a character reader even if you merely use a stock spiel which you give to every client [ed: aka sexy babe]. [S]everal laboratory studies have had excellent success with the following stock spiel (Snyder and Shenkel 1975):

“Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary and resented. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. You pride yourself on being an independent thinker and do nor accept others’ opinions without satisfactory proof. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. Disciplined and controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.

“Your sexual adjustment has presented some problems for you. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a strong need for other people to like you and for them to admire you.”

Naturally, you shouldn’t think you have to quote this verbatim. Suit to taste. The key is to get the general gist of it and verbalize it in a way that is appropriate for the context which you share with the woman, and which is congruent with your vibe. Interestingly, the best cold reads are 75% positive and 25% negative.

We found that the best recipe for creating acceptable stock spiels was to include about 75 percent desirable items, but ones which were seen as specific, and about 25 percent undesirable items, but ones which were seen as general. The undesirable items had the apparent effect of making the spiel plausible.

This is very similar in function to vulnerability game, which works by making your projected alphaness seem more plausible to women.

So now that we know cold reading works to build an intimate connection with a woman by making her feel like you know her better than anyone else, the next question is “why does it work”? From the same paper:

But why does it work? And why does it work so well? It does not help to say that people are gullible or suggestible. Nor can we dismiss it by implying that some individuals are just not sufficiently discriminating or lack sufficient intelligence to see through it. Indeed one can argue that it requires a certain degree of intelligence on the part of a client for the reading to work well.

This is why my observation that smart, educated girls fall for game harder than dumb girls rings true among those who routinely pick up women. “Only bar skanks fall for game” haters wept.

Once the client is actively engaged in trying to make sense of the series of sometimes contradictory statements issuing from the reader, he becomes a creative problem-solver trying to find coherence and meaning in the total set of statements. The task is not unlike that of trying to make sense of a work of art, a poem, or, for that matter, a sentence. The work of art, the poem, or the sentence serve as a blueprint or plan from which we can construct a meaningful experience by bringing to bear our own past experiences and memories.

In other words the reading succeeds just because it calls upon the normal processes of comprehension that we ordinarily bring to bear in making sense out of any form of communication. The raw information in a communication is rarely, if ever, sufficient in itself for comprehension. A shared context and background is assumed. Much has to be filled in by inference. The good reader, like anyone who manipulates our perceptions, is merely exploiting the normal processes by which we make sense out of the disorderly array of inputs that constantly bombard us.

Like all game tactics, or any self-improvement pursuit, cold reading is a skill that requires practice. Your first efforts will likely meet with incredulous stares or annoyance, but as you get better you’ll begin to see the change in women’s reactions from doubtful and irritated to intrigued and… yep, you bet… horny.

The cold reading derives much of its strength from the inherent narcissim of the average female yes? They really do want to believe they have untapped potential. In my experience, mixing some insult into a compliment is an effective form of flattery.

This just goes to show how absolutely crucial comfort is to the seduction process.

A couple more thoughts:

1. Women are very interested in casual sex, they just need to be a lot more comfortable with the guy before doing it. See here..

2. Autistic women do far less well in the mating market than autistic men, despite the fact that social skills are crucial for a man’s success in this area. My guess as to why this is so: women need comfort and autistic women cannot make an emotional connection with a man.

LOL, Heartsie, I wasn’t serious. Everyone knows that our brain is seeking pleasure but now in this article it was written like she discovered America. Not that I have read the whole article or that I understand everything but this sentence sounds stupid, doesn’t it?

[heartiste: nice backpedal. wasn’t it you who repeatedly asserted that women aren’t interested in sex without serious commitment? shall i dig up those comments or will you have the good sense to remain silently dignified?]

Yeah, it was me, btw I’m happy that you remember so much about me – this gives me a nice feeling that I’m an important commenter for you 🙂 Let me explain my point … I imagine that sex+commitment must be more pleasurable than sex only so this idea doesn’t clash with the idea that we are pleasure-seekers … 🙂

Not true. I know a few doctors who are just plain so beta that they have difficulty getting ANY female attention.
Doctors need less game, true, but most have some degree of game already just by their self-confidence.

Back in the day, I could hit a strip club with a couple doctor friends, and they were so beta that even when the 3 of us were the only patrons, the girls were only talking to me and ignoring them. Mostly because I had already done the stripper thing, and wasn’t that impressed by them and they must have sensed the aloofness. Like cats.

Thirty-three years ago, I had a computer in my dorm room ( this was essentially unheard of at the time. Had my own site-id and everything, 300 baud modem, hooked up to the campus mainframe, etc.). I ran a program called “Eliza”, which is the great-great grandfather of these programs.One time, a few friends of my roommate’s girlfriend stopped by, and a couple were fascinated by the computer. I loaded “Eliza” and showed her how it worked. The girl started using it, and became entranced. She started pouring her heart out to the machine- it was weird. My roommate ( a non-techie) commented on how heavily she had gotten into it. I later “dumped” the contents of her session and looked at it. It was all about her boyfriend and their relationship problems, and her feelings.

I’ve always thought that Eliza has an interesting side use as a seduction tool, but the strangeness and “geekiness” of using such a program in a public place would be extremely awkward.

There are versions of thee programs floating around the web, if anyone would care to experiment Please post your field reports here, so I can see how things worked out.

There is another program which has , I feel, enormous potential in the seduction game.

The program is called “Mind Prober”. You answer a bunch of questions, and it gives you a rather detailed psychological profile. You can also answer the questions the way your “target” would, and it will give you their psychological profile. You obviously have to know your target, but if you try this program, you will be very surprised at its’ accuracy.

I’ve looked, casually, for a copy of this program for a while- no results yet ( Lord knows where my copy is- it ran on the original IBM PC). I’ll eventually find a copy.

BTW- as soon as I started reading this post, I knew within the first few sentences that it was an Eliza program. Once you’ve spent time with these programs, the “flow” of the questions gives it away quickly to an experienced user. Although I could see a cute comedy picture with a nerdy protagonist repeating the “Eliza” questions to his target, and frantically feeding her responses to his computer.

Yeah, I found it after I posted the above. I had looked for it a few years ago, without much luck- even torrent sites didn’t have it then. So anyway, I downloaded it, but it refuses to run- it claims a screen size conflict. I’m on windows 7 starter- have you gotten it to run? It’s been YEARS since I tried to run a DOS program on a WIntel box- what’s the trick (or do I have to dig up one of my old DOS machines?)

A complementary tactic is an old journalist trick: when its your turn to say something, don’t say anything. Look at her, creating a vacuum of words that makes her feel off-balance and she feels compelled to fill with more words. Date conversation: well timed dead air is a powerful weapon.

A little off topic, but I just got out of an econ lecture and was more or less exchanging glances with a solid 6-7 for basically the entire class. Anyways, I couldn’t come up with an effective approach (I know that Game is 90% not putting foot in mouth, and that I should’ve just approached regardless and gone with it), but I’d like to solicite opinions from the rest of the Chateau guests on how I should of handled it. I was thinking it would’ve been ballzy to walk up to her and jokingly/sarcastically tell her I was distracted from the (extremely boring) lecture because I kept trying to think of something witty or amusing to tell her, though I didn’t want to start out by raising her relative value. (I’m not sure a neg would’ve been an appropriate opener in this case, though I could’ve said something about how she kept knotting her hair, she just seemed far nicer than most girls I game, who are basically actresses/sluts, which makes it easy). And then more or less go from there, as I’m a pretty charming guy when I need to be. Anyways, thoughts?

Dude, you just spent an hour listening to the same lecture as her. You’re in the same college, and the same class. ANYTHING you say about the class breaks the ice. “Hey, what was our assignment again? Are you in a study group? Good (Bad) lecture, huh? Can I verify something the prof said? I’d like to compare notes to see f I missed anything. Etc., etc. You’re in college- you will probably never spend as much time in a target-rich environment again. Just don’t sweat it, and go for it. What’s the worst thing that’ll happen- she shoots you down? There’s 5000 more where she came from.

I cannot underline how powerful this is. I’ve used it on F500 C level executives (“We’re looking at cuts.” “About 30% of the workforce.”) and and girls I’ve just met at parties (“and . . . I’m a sex worker. Just to pay the rent, you know.”). You’d be surprised how quickly people will spring to fill the void and the judgement it implies. Especially smart and successful people.

And then they will rationalize their action, assuming you to be a trustworthy person. What else can they do? They’ve already told you more in 45 seconds than they tell people they see all day long.

Not sure if this particular episode is relevant here. But I remember a lot of scenes where his (unintentional) game blew me away. Psychotherapy for dummies is a also a potent seduction tool, especially that a lot of modern chicks are haggard train wrecks.

Pleased to say I called that as Eliza on first reading. My old TRS-80 (late 1970s, 4K of memory) had a version of Eliza with whom my gf developed a deep and intimate relationship. She always said that my computer understood her better than I did. She was probably right.

There is also a “paranoid patient” program called Parry.
The nice thing about paranoia is it allows the program to
come up with total non-sequiteurs when it can’t find a
plausible “answer” or continuation to the previous input.

And yes, people have connected Parry with Doctor and
produced endless psychobabble.

The full text cold speech is also old hat. Eysench (sp?) used
this kind of material in his student days to become an instant
graphologist; he had learned enough psych to know what
most people believe about themselves, thus attracting
a nice female crowd.

Thanks for this post! I’ve never been comfortable enough to attempt cold reading but I think I’ll give it a go. To be honest I’ve never really bothered much with *comfort*, and I’m naturally a little wary of most chick-crack as I find it incongruous with a very masculine persona. This certainly seems doable.

@rustic
You need to take the girl’s temperature to assess how to proceed further. So, saunter up to her with a twinkle in your eye. If you feel any trepidation, hide it- appear utterly relaxed. Women respond to confidance. Don’t introduce yourself, you are mysterious. Say “so, are you saving yourself for marriage?”, if the answer’s yes, grin and say ‘just today probably’ and consider quitting. If no, tell her she gives you beautiful ‘feelings’.

While I agree about cold reading as a general good thing to do in seduction process and woman generally like a lot when you can make an observations about them. This article is pretty bad one.

The example of doctor and patient is pretty bad example for a simple reason that such an interview style pickup is a not smart thing to do and will not only not work but will lead to boredom.

[heartiste: this type of convo is meant for the comfort stage, when asking questions of the girl is practically de rigeur. it’s not meant for the attraction stage. early game cold reading would have fewer questions and more statements.]

Way back in high school, I began to simultaneously get less sleep, and make tons of friends.

I was too tired to actually converse with people, so I’d just go on autopilot and repeat what they said back to them in question form. I started to notice that everyone had the same fucking complaints and views of themselves, so I even developed primitive stock shpiels.

I didn’t understand it at the time, but members of both genders began respecting me and my opinion for reasons totally beyond my understanding. It was just primitive cold reading. But it was POWERFUL.

“Emprically, women use more health care, they cost more, estimates are around 35%. Some of this is childbearing, but a lot of it comes from the simple fact they go to the doctor more often (notice women see their gynecologists rather regularly, whereas men have no comparable service). So now charging women more for something they use more of is illegal because it discriminates.

Interestingly, in the 1970’s there was a law passed so that upon retirement, the annual payments to female retirees had to be the same as for male retirees even though women live longer, statistically. That is, the present value of their retirement packages, by law, are larger for women than men. “

When my ex and I were in reconciliation counseling some years ago (it didn’t work, thank God) we were taught to repeat what the other said in order to reinforce communication and understanding. I started taking that tack when chatting with my then eight, now twelve-year-old daughter. I don’t pay much attention to what she says but I rephrase and repeat and question a la Eliza. Result: she often says that I’m the only person in the family who listens to her and understands her. I’m doing the same with her older sister (and her friends) with similar results. As I’ve said many times, this blog and game flat out saved my relationships with my daughters. All Hail the Proprietor!

And as I said in an earlier comment my high school gf was quite enamoured of Eliza as implemented on my early home computer. I noted it and commented on it at the time but never understood why and it never occurred to me to do the same until a few years ago. How can such obvious truth be right in front of you and go unrecognized for forty years?

I do a lot of online game, only because I sit at a compooter all day and want something to do from time to time. Any who, whenever I read posts from The Chateau and other sources that I can incorporate via online game I give it a go. Call it a social experiment with the added benefit of frequently breaking down some boxes. I decided to incorporate some of the cold reading excerpt from this post, sprinkled in some specifics about the girl at hand…sort of a fill-in-the-blank email volley. The results? So far, out of 9-10 emails I’ve sent out to (7.5s – 8.5s as per their highly flattering pictures) the response rate has been nearly 100%. One or two haven’t even read it yet, but for online game that’s an insane response rate. OF the girls that responded, their response is always the same: “Wow, that’s a pretty accurate description of me…blah, blah, blah.” Even got one “I think you get me,” adult beverages have already been scheduled with this one. Lines and wordplay that are successful online almost always translates to successful banter in real life interactions. I will definitely be incorporating this in my vast repertoire of tactics I use with the wimenz. Great post. A highly potent tactic.

I learned the trick of rephrasing what is said to you from a marriage counselor decades ago. She was mostly admirable, and I found her to be a worthy mentor. I didn’t pursue the counseling as I didn’t want to be married, but found her services useful for the disentangling stage.

Anyway, since learning that trick I’ve tried to incorporate it into my communication style. It’s also useful to keep forum and blog discussions focused. In forums you can blockquote what you are responding to, and that helps keep the discussion focused, but I also like to paraphrase and summarize the other persons point of view.

woman are nasty fucking cunts and im not talking about puss either. for all i care, sticking my dick in a blender gives me more pleasure. And your all proud to be hetero? sucks to be you..

anyway, i submitted the wrong essay to class and wanted to resubmit the correct one – on the same day it was due – but this cunt got all suspicious and high and mighty, as high and mighty as a cunt could ever be. the old bitch said she would think about it. and the correct essay was a little masterwork in and of itself, truth be told. fucking cunts, no artist’s soul, no bohemian spirit, just the usual cunt nastiness. and the bloody thing is like 25% of my mark

cunts are cold as ice, which is just the way you’re supposed to like ’em

why couldn’t i have been born into a world where men reproduce with
other men????

I’m an old guy, not in the dating scene at all. Last night on the street in SF something came over me and I walked up to an attractive mixed race 21-year old who was wearing those jeans that are pre-ripped at the thighs and knees. I pointed down at her legs and said, “Isn’t that, like, 1999 or something? What happened next surprised me. She and her two friends immediately went into their “Oh my God !!! routine. They just kept saying it over and over, with one hand covering their mouths and their eyes wide as saucers. What did this mean?

When you look at this image, your System 1 is taking over and telling you that the two lines are different lengths. But in reality the two lines are the same length.

Or think of the first answer that comes to mind when you read this math problem:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total.
The bat costs $1 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

For a lot of people, the intuitive answer is 10 cents but that’s wrong.

Intuitive thinking is good at reading body language, voice tone, and telling if an object is bigger or smaller than another. But it’s bad at making sense of randomness and probability/statistics.

Of course, women pride themselves on being the naturally more intuitive sex. The problem is that intuition can easily be taken advantage of, especially by someone who knows how. This is why shit like the Cube, Strawberry Fields, Sex and the City roles, Astrology, Tarot cards, and somewhat vague statements (“you guys are trouble…”) where “intuition” (i.e. the hamster) takes over is like girl crack. Successful seducers probably know this either deliberately or because they themselves are more intuitive as well.

It’s no fluke, then, that women are more religious than men. People who consistently score low on problems that are deliberately designed to fool people who rely too much on intuitive thinking are more likely to believe in a god than those who stop and think about the question. It’s also probably no coincidence that while women are more religious than men, men are the ones who have created the world’s major religions.

you know, this type of instruction is really interesting. Would people concur that high IQ types who try to swoop in on girls have failed to understand, in the past, about the comfort building stage and instead try to be really clever and focus on impressing the girl with well turned (nerd) phrasing? I think the host has mentioned this before and I recall exchanges where the attempted witty banter achieved nothing. So, instead, elicit values through some form of cold reading, eh?

A late entry as a testament to the effectiveness of restatement and open-ended questions: my twelve-year-old daughter (who lives with her mother eight hours away) called last night in hysterics. Cold-hearted bastard that I am, I ran straight Eliza Game on her, responding to her just like the program would. Within fifteen minutes I had her laughing and planning activities for my upcoming visit and saying “I want to live with you because YOU UNDERSTAND ME.”

I had this program on my TRS-80 thirty-five years ago and learned nothing from it then. Just call me Ron. Mo Ron.